Instant Action Mod: Play offline with computer players
Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2018 2:19 pm
This mod allows one to play the multiplayer maps offline with computer players without the use of a trainer.
Download link
Extract to your Army Men RTS root directory.
Does not interfere with online play!
This slightly modifies the lobby of a multiplayer game to allow you to force a game to begin even without two players. The lobby will have a new button labeled 'offline'. Press this button after adding some computer players to start your game! Be sure to set all your settings properly, as this button bypasses any checks for a valid game. Don't set everyone on the same team!
Pressing this button and launching the game with other players will not crash the game, however you will need to abort loading if you want to make a new game. This mod also features an improved map select feature. Now when selecting a map, you can have a much larger list to pick from and can even pick a random map. (Note that the random function of the game is not true and therefore does not reshuffle; the only way to reshuffle the list is to add a new map to the directory.)
One final note is how this mod works. It accomplishes this by launching the current game as a single player map instead of a multiplayer one. This is completely function and reads all of the attributes of a normal multiplayer map; including teams, team colors, names, and HUD elements.
However, the one flaw in this method is that this will also read difficulty settings, which while this wouldn't be a problem normally, Army Men RTS has no difficulty level that is 'even'. I.E. easy difficulty and normal difficulty are both a greater than 1:1 ratio, while the hard difficulty is more than a 1:1 ratio.
To fix this, I made the hard difficulty truly even, and also decreased the first two difficulties by the same ratio. This is, I feel, to be a reasonable compromise, as the only immediate difference you will ever see with this modified difficulty is that Sarge can now take an extra hit from a sniper on the easier two difficulties; and that's assuming he does not take fire from anything else at the time.
Please let me know what you guys think, and be sure to report any problems here.
Download link
Extract to your Army Men RTS root directory.
Does not interfere with online play!
This slightly modifies the lobby of a multiplayer game to allow you to force a game to begin even without two players. The lobby will have a new button labeled 'offline'. Press this button after adding some computer players to start your game! Be sure to set all your settings properly, as this button bypasses any checks for a valid game. Don't set everyone on the same team!
Pressing this button and launching the game with other players will not crash the game, however you will need to abort loading if you want to make a new game. This mod also features an improved map select feature. Now when selecting a map, you can have a much larger list to pick from and can even pick a random map. (Note that the random function of the game is not true and therefore does not reshuffle; the only way to reshuffle the list is to add a new map to the directory.)
One final note is how this mod works. It accomplishes this by launching the current game as a single player map instead of a multiplayer one. This is completely function and reads all of the attributes of a normal multiplayer map; including teams, team colors, names, and HUD elements.
However, the one flaw in this method is that this will also read difficulty settings, which while this wouldn't be a problem normally, Army Men RTS has no difficulty level that is 'even'. I.E. easy difficulty and normal difficulty are both a greater than 1:1 ratio, while the hard difficulty is more than a 1:1 ratio.
To fix this, I made the hard difficulty truly even, and also decreased the first two difficulties by the same ratio. This is, I feel, to be a reasonable compromise, as the only immediate difference you will ever see with this modified difficulty is that Sarge can now take an extra hit from a sniper on the easier two difficulties; and that's assuming he does not take fire from anything else at the time.
Please let me know what you guys think, and be sure to report any problems here.